A modern grunge based theme

Ecolife steps up where Ecolift left off. It's a modern revisioning of the grunge / textured design idea, maintaining the same soft grunge elements and minimalism that people loved in the original, combined with the added focus on performance and responsiveness.

You have probably already seen in your Joomla 3+ installations that there is a new major version of Joomla available. Joomla 3.4 is the next major Joomla release and it contains a selection of improvements and feature additions - so should you click the update button?

At the end of last year, Jisse Reitsma published a new book called Programming Joomla Plugins. You may know of Jisse through his work at Yireo, the developers of the well known Joomla / Magento bridge extension called MageBridge.

Yireo have been around since the beginning of Joomla and have over 60 Joomla and Magento extensions in their catalogue.

While I eagerly wait for my copy of the book to to arrive, I thought I would ask Jisse a few questions to find out more about the book and in particular his motivation for writing the Programming Joomla Plugins.

Hi Jisse, nice to meet you. Can you tell us about your background? What is your experience in Joomla development?

As founder and lead developer of Yireo, I have been developing Joomla extensions since 2006 or so. I started building sites back in the Mambo days and once Joomla 1.0 got out, I started fiddling with the Joomla code to get things done.

As soon as Joomla 1.5 came out (alpha 2), I created my first MVC component and I have been focussing on writing extensions ever since.

Currently, extension development is my main task. Besides Joomla, Yireo also focuses on Magento, so I've developed quite a lot of Magento extensions as well.

Following the release of our Venture Joomla template late last week I have just released updates for all of our other Zen Grid Framework v4 (ZGF4) based themes - Xero, Rasa2, Focus2 and Venture.

This update adds two new features to the framework and a stack of improvements and a number of bug fixes.

Row Styles

Since the release of Xero - our first theme on ZGF4 - we have had numerous requests on tips for how to apply a full block of colour to specific rows of modules. As of v1.2 this is possible from within the template admin and without adding any new custom code.

Venture is a responsive flat design that suits a number of purposes. You can use it to create a Joomla business, blog, news or magazine site. It's blazingly fast out of the box and also provides you with an enormous amount of control for creating the perfect layout and theme control for your next project.

A fullscreen background slideshow theme

It's a responsive design with a built in background slideshow that allows you to place single or multiple images underneath your content. The slideshow has a fullscreen toggle which allows the user to toggle the site into a fullscreen mode where the content of the website is hidden revealing the glory of the image / s being displayed underneath.

This is a somewhat belated post announcing the release of our Rasa2 template ...

Rasa2 is an elegant minimal design built on the Zen Grid Framework v4. It's a simple theme that provides some refined clean lines with nicely balanced white space, which is ideal for presenting your content or your products in style.

Our second Zen Grid Framework v4 theme

Rasa2 is a fast and lightweight responsive template and comes with all of the features of our Zen Grid Framework v4 themes, including a simple Mega menu, responsive layout tool, a range of responsive tools for controlling how your site behaves across different screen sizes, asset optimisation and more.

Use the coupon cyberbamboo on our checkout page and take 30% off your next template subscription. Existing and previous members can use the 30% coupon with our existing renewal coupons (jbrenewal and jbrenewal2) to take a further 20 or 10% off.

One of the things I wanted to do when we released the Zen Grid Framework v4 was to create a living knowledgebase ie one that was easy for us and our users to add information to. It’s important because it means our documentation can be maintained using some simple tools that allow us to track and change documentation with a minimum of fuss.

As I mentioned at the start of this month we have been working on a new version of our Joomla template framework, the Zen Grid Framework v4 (ZGF4), and I’m very happy to announce that it has (finally) arrived. The first theme to be released on the the ZGF4 is the Xero template. It’s a simple theme but it is very very fast.

Xero is our new starter theme that we will be building all future themes from and is an ideal starting point for users to get to know the new version of the framework with.